SearchEngineWatch: Ask Jeeves Serves It Your Way
Ask Jeeves bowed new personalization features today and, as predicted here some weeks ago, a more fit looking butler mascot. [Comparison shown at left, although the new Jeeves (right) is now sporting a long tie on the new site.] The personalization features allow users to save searches, results, and even notes, creating over time a personal directory of useful sites. An Ask Jeeves executive told SearchEngineWatch that the sharing of these directories may not be far off. The company also introduced the beta of its local search engine, powered by CitySearch.
SearchEngineLowdown also reports that Ask Jeeves will be launching its desktop search play - very likely a modified version of the Tukaroo technology it acquired three months ago - in this coming 4th Quarter.
Ask Jeeves' new features earned a fairly uncommon endorsement from SearchEngineWatch, which noted that the search engine came a very long way in a short period of time.
ClickZ's story on the announcements includes a description of Ask Jeeves' upgraded underlying search engine. Teoma 3.0 is reportedly better at seeking relevant results, now includes two billion pages, will crawl sites more frequently and intelligently and includes Flash and PDF documents. In the coming quarter, it will also reportedly included cached versions of pages, much like Google does.
